Lessons on the accordion and in jingle studio underscore Manilow's half-century as pop icon

Commercial jingles taught lessons, he says

contributed photo/Denise Truscello
Manilow to perform in The Ford Center on Wednesday.

Barry Manilow.

Barry Manilow learned lots at New York's Juilliard School, but his most notable musical training came before and after his time at the prestigious performing arts school, says the 70-year-old adult contemporary pop star.

It started in the slums of Brooklyn, where his parents struggled to scrape together the money to pay for lessons on a rented accordion. And his "real college" came several years after Julliard, during the years he wrote jingles for soft drinks, fast food and self-adhesive bandages.

Manilow comes to Evansville this week as one of the best-known and most enduring songwriters of his generation, still touring after more than a half-century writing, recording and performing his own and other's songs. His repertoire of adult contemporary pop hits includes "Mandy," "Even Now," "Ready to Take a Chance Again," "Looks Like We Made It," "At the Copa," "Old Songs" and "I Write the Songs."

Manilow won't pump an accordion or pitch soda and hamburgers in The Ford Center Wednesday night, but his lessons on the accordion and in commercial jingle studios underscore all of his work, he said in a recent telephone call from his home in Southern California.

It all started when his parents "stuck an accordion in my hands."

"I come from no money," he said, "but my parents knew I was musical. They found enough money to rent an accordion for me and get me lessons."

That was critical, because "I learned how to read music on that accordion."

He learned lots more from jingles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, from composing to arranging to singing, he said. "I went to Juilliard, but my three or four years writing jingles was really my college."

His assignments were commercial ditties for Pepsi, Dr Pepper, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds ("You Deserve a Break Today"). He worked in the studio and sang on State Farm Insurance's "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there," and he affected a child's voice for Band-Aid's "I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, ‘cause Band-Aid's stuck on me."

His professors in jingle school were some of the top professionals in the business, from the studio engineers to the sessions instrumentalists and singers to the technicians, he said. He learned to arrange there and "I learned how to sing in a studio in a background group of studio singers," he said.

And composing jingles taught him how to write a pop song.

"You have to learn to write a catchy melody in 15 seconds," Manilow said. "Your melody has to be the catchiest melody there, otherwise the other guy that's going up for the jingle is going to get the spot, and there were lots of other guys going up for those jingles."

Manilow included some of his jingles in some of his early concerts. "When I started doing it, it was the act of a desperate man," he said. His first album has "some very nice songs," he said, "but I didn't have any hit records. I knew if I didn't give audiences something they knew, they were going to get bored. So I put together a medley of all the jingles I had been involved with."

The segment, which became known as "V. S. M" or "Very Strange Medley," turned out to be "the right thing to do," he said. "It just blew the place apart and made the headlines in every review."

After a half-century in the business, he doesn't need to pad his programs with jingles, but the skills he learned writing commercial tunes plays through all his work.

And he hasn't forgotten the importance of the accordion, or of any instrument placed in the hands of a young person hungry to learn music.

As with all his concerts on this tour, the Manilow Music Project and Yamaha Corp. will donate a Yamaha piano to the local schools — in this case the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp.

He's also offered free tickets to audience members who give new or "gently used" instruments to the schools. Donors can bring the instruments to the Ford Center, where they can redeem them for a pair of tickets to Wednesday's show.

"If they do it before the show, I give them free tickets. If they bring them afterward I give them a big ‘thank you,'" he said.

"We've been collecting 75 to 100 instruments in every city," he said. "We'll take anything we can get. They pile them up in the hallway outside my dressing room, and it's great. Everything from guitars to drum sets to saxes and flutes. I've gotten everything. Somebody gave a kazoo."

For Manilow, it's a chance to help new generations discover music and all the skills that come with it.

"Their grades go up, they learn how to interact with other students better, it makes them better students, it makes them better people. It changes their lives," he said.